History of the Barons von Schilling

From Brunswick to the Baltic

Kaspar Schilling, a son of Georg,
mentioned in records in Brunswick in 1490, is said to have
appeared shortly afterwards in Livonia, which was then a
state governed by an Order of Knights. We do not know
exactly when, where and why he got the idea of leaving the
then relatively peaceful Brunswick to go to the "Wild
East". Neither do we have any information about what
Kaspar did in Brunswick. There are several indications that
he might have been a merchant there and maintained intensive
contacts with Livonia. Kaspar may possibly have been
employed in the Hanseatic trading post in Novgorod which was
closed by Ivan III, the Muscovite Tsar, in 1494.

Contacts
with Wolter von Plettenberg, the new strong man in Livonia
who was elected as the Grand Master of the Order in 1494,
might have induced him to move to this country which was
gaining in significance as an outpost of Eastern trade. Be
this as it may, it was certainly a good idea to rely on
Plettenberg at that time. Under his leadership, the Army of
the Order defeated superior Russian forces in 1502, as they
were moving westwards, and secured peace for the country
again for another half-century.

Kaspar, who is strangely
called Wilhelm in the official family register of the
Curonian Assembly of Knights, left no trace in Livonia. He,
who was born in 1470, possibly returned to Brunswick and
left only his son Nikolaus as a "base" in the
East.

His older son Friedrich and his daughter Anna are
mentioned in Brunswick as late as 1523, whereas there are no
records of the younger children Wilhelm, Adolf and Adelheid.
However, his daughter Katharina married a v.d. Ropp in Old
Livonia (Semigallia).

Oddly enough, two other Schillings
appeared in Livonia at about the same time, also called
Wilhelm and Adolf. They originated from the Schillings from
Gustorf on the Lower Rhine.

From 1541 to 1549, Wilhelm was
the Senior in Selburg. Adolf, who died in 1540, already
held the post of House Commander in Wenden (now Cesis) from
1537 to 1539. These two men undoubtedly had a good
relationship with the Grand Master of the Order. Since
Wenden was the seat of the Order in Livonia, they were his
close collaborators.

So, does the Baltic branch of the family
not originate from the so-called Erik family but from the
Gustorf line? Is that why the progenitor in the Assembly of
Knights is called Wilhelm? This is improbable, because the
men of the Order were not allowed to marry. Perhaps Kaspar
became friendly with the men from Gustorf during a business
trip to Livonia, left his son Nikolaus, possibly an
illegitimate child, in the care of Wilhelm and gave his
younger sons the first names of his two friends. Perhaps the
Knights of the Order confused Nikolaus'
"foster-father" with his birth father at a later
date. But this is all speculation – back to the facts.

In
1548, a Grand Master of the Order called Brüggeney
enfeoffed Nikolaus with the Meschgail estate (later the
Schillingshof) in what is today the county of Riga, not all
that far from Wenden (now Cesis).

After the death of Plettenberg, the fall
of the rule of the Order of Knights in Livonia began in
1535. Plettenberg's successors were not able to solve the
country's internal problems after the Reformation and to
face up to Tsar Ivan the Terrible as opponents on an equal
standing. In 1560, the army of the Order suffered a decisive
defeat by the Russians. As a consequence, Old Livonia
disintegrated. It ceased to be part of the German Empire.
However, the Muscovites were not initially able to find
their feet in Livonia. Revel (German: Reval, now: Tallinn)
and the northern part of the country (i.e. Estonia)
submitted to the Swedish and the bishoprics of Oesel and
Courland (Pilten monastery) to Denmark. The rest of Old
Livonia fell under Lithuanian-Polish protection. The last
Grand Master of the order, Gotthard Kettler, managed to keep
for himself the Order District of Courland, the area south
of the Dvina, as a Polish hereditary fief duchy.

Courland

And this is where the Schillings'
contacts with the Masters of the Order come to the fore
again.

Kaspar II, Nikolaus' oldest son, did not stay on his
father's estate of Meschgail, but moved to Courland, where
he acquired "modest" properties (according to
Vietinghoff, Archivist of the Curonian Knights' Archive,
1943) from the newly appointed Duke.

On April 3rd 1563, Kaspar
Schilling was given three farms near Bauske for life-long
use for a loan of 1600 Marks and on January
13th 1581 five for 2000 Marks. On March 4th 1586, he
was given a life-long right of lien for these farms for
himself and his sons. The second youngest of Nikolaus' four
sons, Valentin, stayed in Livonia, on the estate of
Meschgail, three "Haken" in size, which remained
in the possession of the family until 1682.

Valentin is the progenitor of the now
defunct Livonian partial family line. He represented the
Eastern branch of the family at an event which may seem
strange but was not unusual at the time, namely the
inheritance alliance of the Schilling family, which was
formed by six lines of the family with different
coat-of-arms in Breslau on August 15th 1556. This
alliance aimed to settle hereditary succession in the
family. We do not know why it was Valentin who travelled to
Silesia from distant Livonia. Perhaps Valentin used this
journey to demonstrate the not very certain origins of his
family.

Registration in the Knights' Bank

Valentin's involvement in the Breslau
meeting may have been useful to his nephew Alexander, who
represented the family before the Curonian Knights' Bank
with the aim of achieving entry in the Curonian Roll in
1620.

Applicants had various alternative ways of proving
that their family were of noble blood. Alexander selected
the method most frequently used, namely invoking the
"Notorium", i.e. he stated that the family was of
noble origin. The minutes of the assembly show (according to
Vietinghoff's records) two "poor" ancestors among
a total of 16 in the paternal and maternal lines. Not until
the end of the assembly was he finally accepted. It is not
impossible that the two "poor" ancestors were the
cause of the delay. Registration was necessary to secure the
position of the nobility after the end of the rule of the
Order of Knights.

Lithuania

Alexander's elder brother Georg inherited
his father's property. However, he only remained holder of
the lien for the five farms near Bauske for two years. He
then moved to the estates of his wife Margarete, née
Urader, who owned, among other properties, the Lambertshof
in Courland. But this never came into the possession of the
Schilling family, although Georg's son Matthias (Werner)
called himself "heir of Lambertshof". In addition,
Matthias was the lien lord of Brunowisci in the county of
Ipice in Lithuania from 1634 to 1649.

At that time, most of
the estates in northern Lithuania belonged to Curonian
nobility. Since Lithuania was united with Poland then,
Courland belonged to the Polish crown too. A grandson of
Matthias, Matthias Georg, acquired the Pojulen estate in
1717, which gave a branch of the family the additional name
of "Pojulen". Since Matthias Georg, the Schillings
in the Baltic signed their name as "von
Schilling".

Alexander's descendants also moved to
Lithuania. In 1676, his grandson Alexander Johann became
master of Schilling-Pommusch. Alexander Johann's second wife
was Emerentia von Borch, who had inherited from her first
husband, Karl von Szoege, the usufructuary rights to the
estates of Kommodern and Brunnowiski in Lithuania, but the
estates themselves belonged to the eight children from her
marriage to Szoege.

Alexander Ladislaus (born in 1681), the
only son of the marriage between Alexander and Emerentia,
inherited Pommusch in his father's will but sold it again in
1712.

Estonia

His grandson, Alexander Magnus, lien lord
of Breden (again in the county of Bauske), went bankrupt in
1763.

The name of Alexander Magnus also appears in a
publication of the Institute for Archive Science in Marburg,
listing all the soldiers sold to England by the Landgrave of
Hesse Kassel to reinforce the troops fighting against the
rebel American independence forces. Whereas it was hitherto
believed that he was the first Schilling to emigrate to
America, taking his wife and four children with him, it has
meanwhile become clear that he actually never left Germany
for America. Moreover, he was only 18 years old at the time
and would hardly have had a wife and children already. So
this matter needs to be investigated.

This branch of the
family died out in Lithuania and Courland.

His brother,
Alexander Magnus, went to Austria for reasons still unknown,
probably as an officer (cavalry captain), and died in St.
Pölten (Lower Austria) in 1834. He formed a side branch of
the family, which flourished as part of the petite
bourgeoisie without a title.

The owner of Pojuhlen, Matthias Georg,
had three sons. The second son, Friedrich Wilhelm (1684 to
1756), appears to have had no great agricultural ambitions.
He joined the army and sold his share in Pojuhlen to his
older brother Otto Nikolaus.

The Pojuhlen branch can no longer be
traced after 1761. The youngest son, Gotthard Ernnst, owned
various properties in Lithuania. His son Karl Nikolaus
bought the Pomusch estate back for the Schillings in 1778
and it remained in the family's possession until 1878. Then
this branch died out.

Friedrich Wilhelm was discharged from the
army in 1714 because of numerous wounds and lived, as he
said himself "poorly but contentedly" in Lithuania
and Courland until his death.

His 3rd son Karl
Gebhard became the progenitor of the Estonian line, the
branches of which flourish all over the world as the only
proven heirs of the Eastern line of the family.

Large Estate Owners in Estonia

Karl Gebhard's career certainly did not
have a promising start. In 1733, at the age of 14, he joined
the Russian Army as a common soldier and distinguished
himself several times in the Seven-Year War (1756 to 1763)
fought by Frederick the Great against Austria and,
initially, Russia, for the acquisition of Silesia. Karl
Gebhard was finally discharged from field service as a
Major-General in 1760 after being wounded several times and
sent to Estonia to the Baltischport project, involving the
construction of a fortress and a harbour. On September
15th 1760, he married the widowed Helena Charlotte von Römer,
née von Tiesenhausen, there and retired from military
service in 1765.

This is where a new chapter in family
history begins, namely the management of estates in Estonia.
Karl Gebhard took over the Seinigal estate from his wife and
later bought Orgena, where he went to live in 1765.

155 years later, when estates were
expropriated in 1919/1920, the Schilling estates were the
second largest (21 estates covering an area of 41,000
hectares) in this Russian province, coming after those of
the Stackelbergs.

On application of Karl Gebhard, the
Schilling family was entered in the Estonian Register of
Nobility in 1768. By edicts issued by the Imperial Russian
Directing Senate on May 18th 1834 and October 17th
1855, the right of the Estonian branch of the family
to use the title of Baron was officially recognized,
although it has already existed previously.

Karl Gebhard's brother Gotthard Raffael
rose to an even higher rank. Thanks to personal contacts
with the Austrian Field-Marshall Ernst von Loudon, who came
from Livonia, he joined the Austrian Army, advanced to
become a Major-General and a Royal and Imperial Chamberlain
and was granted the title of an Imperial Freiherr in 1772.
In 1781, he was elevated to the rank of an Imperial Count,
as Count Schilling von Schillingshof, although the
Schillingshof had already been lost to the possession of the
family for a long time by then. Gotthard Raffael remained
unmarried.

However, Karl Gebhard's only son, Fabian
Wilhelm, made sure that the Schillings multiplied quickly in
Estonia. His second wife, Anna Juliane, née von Rosen, bore
him 13 children.

Karl Raffael inherited Serrefer, Gustav
Gideon Orgena and Alexander Napoleon Seinigal and founded
these branches of the family. Gustav Gideon's son Georg
Walter later became the founder of the Jürgensberg branch.

Sadly, we know very little about Fabian
Wilhelm and do not even have a picture of him. During his
short time of study in Germany (probably mainly in Berlin
and Göttingen) from the spring of 1778 until the death of
his father in the summer of 1779, he acquired the rank of a
Hesse-Darmstadt Lieutenant-Colonel. Fabian Wilhelm seems to
have had many different interests. He wrote poetry, was a
Freemason and acted in plays.

Relocation and Emigration

Following the unrest in the Baltic
provinces (1906), the 1st World War and the
Russian revolution (1917), several parts of the family moved
to Germany.

Because of the expropriation of large properties
and dissolution of the Assemblies of the Estates, there were
great changes in the lives of all the German families when
the republics of Estonia and Latvia were formed in 1918. In
1939, relocation to the German Reich marked the end of the
centuries of history of the Baltic Germans. This programme
was part of the German-Russian non-aggression pact in August
1939.

Most of the resettled Schillings found a new home in
the cities and country estates – initially managed in a
temporary capacity – in the districts of Danzig (now
Gdansk)-West Prussia and Wartheland, until the families were
scattered all over Germany and the world when they fled from
the Russians in 1945.

Of the 143 family members registered
in 1996, 80, i.e. the majority, lived in the Federal
Republic of Germany. There are meanwhile 53 in Canada, four
in South Africa, two in Denmark, two in the USA and one each
in Finland, Switzerland and Guadeloupe.

Emigration of family
members to Canada began as early as 1927, when Gebhard and
Friedrich (Fritz), the two eldest sons of Hermann (Orgena),
sought their fortune in the New World. Whereas Gebhard
returned in 1939, farmer Fritz formed a new house of
Schilling on Vancouver Island with his six children, and
this has now grown to consist of 30 people.

Georg (Jürgen, Orgena), a nephew of
Fritz twice removed, emigrated to the city of Vancouver in
1953.

In the Fifties, four of Bodo and Inge's children
(Serrefer) went to the east of Canada, namely Karin, Wolter,
Heinrich and Kurt.

The house of Serrefer is currently
flourishing in Ontario and British Columbia and one member
of this family group has married into the province of
Quebec. There, in Montreal, a cousin of Georg, Dagmar, whose
married name is Edel, has now settled too.